MLS Final - Want vs Need

MLS does not hide their desire to have good teams playing in big markets. Los Angeles is the biggest beneficiary of top talent with Toronto and NY (Red Bulls normally or City FC) not far behind. Ever since Seattle joined, they too have landed huge stars. For the most part, it has worked the way MLS wanted as the LA Galaxy have been in almost half (9/19) the finals across league history, which includes appearances in three of the last four (winning each).

Is that the right recipe, though? TV ratings for the MLS Cup final (the league's highest-rated match of the year) have generally declined since 1996. Part of that is due to the move from ABC to ESPN, but those games have been steadily shrinking since the switch over in 2009.

To help turn this around the league gave in and allowed two channels to carry the final last year. It worked as far as eyes on the game. At first glance you would think that it was the star-heavy team in LA and the large market in New England that drove the uptick in ratings - ESPN pulled 1.0 million, it's best since 2009, and Unimas pulled another 0.7 - but in reality it was likely just one of those stars that helped it out... a retiring USMNT star in Landon Donovan.



MLS is trying out the same approach this year, only the final will be missing Donovan. Both ESPN and Unimas will televise the match. It means more viewers for sure but the potential matchups this year are far from what they had last year (not to mention what the weather might be in a couple of those cities).

Two years ago Sporting KC hosted Real Salt Lake. The game was broadcast on ESPN and it pulled a miserable rating of 500k viewers. Two lesser known teams in mid-sized markets with no crossover national team stars (sorry Zusi and Besler) played in bad soccer weather conditions.

There is a real possibility that this year the league could see a similar matchup. Even if the NY Red Bulls beat out Crew SC and host the final, they don't have the star power of 2014 LA (or 2012, or 2011 LA). The big market, yes. That checks off one box, but they miss on big names and good weather. None of this is to mention that the game starts at 4 pm in the middle of a NFL afternoon (in a previous post I noted what the NFL does to MLS ratings, see links at bottom).

This adds up to bad news for MLS on the TV ratings front. No matter the matchup in the final, fewer people will be watching this year.

How many fewer? Here is a look at where the teams remaining fell during the regular season across all networks on ESPN and FS1 (pulled out UniMás, as good as ratings were, their cable reach measurably less - different market as well, will get a separate post in the future).

MLS likely wants a Portland at NY Red Bulls Final

The bright side of this situation for MLS is they type of soccer that can be played by the four remaining teams. Each one of the remaining teams try to play the sport. It might not always be pretty, but they aren't out there hoofing it (Houston) around or fouling the hell out of the opponent (KC).

You can't overstate the power that Landon Donovan had last year for both the English and Spanish-speaking audience. There are many issues MLS brings on themselves in terms of scheduling, competition format, rules, etc... but one thing they'll get right this year is having the "right" teams in the final.

The league might not be happy with the ratings and the regulars out in the media world will go deep on what didn't work in the shadow of bad ratings, but there is good that will happen in that final.

It might not be what they want, but it will be a little taste of what they need.

Now... about this competition format.

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This post is part of my continued look at MLS TV ratings this year. For a couple recent thoughts on the subject, check out:

MLS TV Ratings Flat in Playoffs
Over There is a League
NFL Decimates MLS TV Ratings

[podcast] Red Cards in Helltown - Playoff Special

Rick Gethin, David Burgin, Justin Bell and Larry Johnson got together right after the two Eastern Conference Semifinals to talk about what went down. Check it out!

Shutout Needed, Wild One Expected

uh oh

Throughout the season, Columbus Crew SC have been one of the more entertaining and satisfying MLS teams to watch. Playing an attacking type of possession game has pushed this year's team towards the top in the goal scoring category. Second overall, actually. That comes from being fifth in shots per game and first in those on target.

With all that attacking comes a rather leaky defense. Looking past the two late season shutouts the Crew posted against Toronto and DC in the last two games of the regular season, the team was only able to blank one team in the previous 26 matches (Chicago on August 15th). 

Anyone paying attention should know that discounting late regular season games is important. A lot of bad decisions are made over the course of late-season runs of form. Think of the Columbus Blue Jackets late last year when they had nothing to lose or the Colorado Rapids this year in MLS. Last minute efforts when other teams are winding down and / or prepping for the postseason leads many a team GM or President astray. It's fool's gold.

The addition of Gaston Sauro to the Crew defense might be more about timing than anything. Sauro is a good player, but one person is not able to turn a poor defensive team into a good one. Montreal had no trouble getting quality opportunities last weekend with a full strength Crew backline.

Montreal has outright beaten Columbus three times this year already, outscoring them by 5 goals even though they've dominated by the Crew in terms of possession and shots. Interesting note: the Impact have taken 12 fewer shots (29-41) but gotten 6 more on target (18-12). 

The first two games between these two were similar. Lots of opportunities for Columbus but poor finishing. Last match things changed a bit. Crew controlled the ball but were shut down offensively. Were it not for a somewhat right-place, right-time Higuain, the Crew could be looking at a much different game today.

A Crew shutout win would be incredibly impressive, considering. I don't think it will matter who scores first this evening. Goals will happen in this match. When the first one goes in, hold on.

2015 HELLTOWN PLAYER OF THE YEAR

The all-caps title is kinda over the top. Been using the same tools to measure performance here at Helltown, five years now. Bradley Wright-Phillips is the HELLTOWN BEER PLAYER OF THE YEAR for 2015. I'm as surprised as you are. I trust my system, though. Stay up to date. Throughout the year, I keep this MLS stuff updated on the right-hand nav of this site...

Below - past winners of such, this as.

2014 - ROBBIE KEANE 

DARLINGTON NAGBE - 2013

MLS 2014-15 Combined Standings, Cost per Point

There are many ways to measure success in Major League Soccer. Outside of performance in the playoffs (which, by the nature of it, can be influenced by loads of outside factors), perhaps the cleanest was is to look a regular season table points total of the last two years.

Pts	Team	GD
115	Seattle Sounders FC	23
114	FC Dallas	23
112	LA Galaxy	42
110	D.C. United	13
110	New York Red Bulls	24
105	Columbus Crew SC	15
105	New England Revolution	6
103	Vancouver Whitecaps FC	11
102	Portland Timbers	11
100	Sporting Kansas City	10
97	Real Salt Lake	5
90	Toronto FC	-10
81	Houston Dynamo	-26
79	Philadelphia Union	-13
79	Montreal Impact	-16
77	San Jose Earthquakes	-13
69	Colorado Rapids	-29
66	Chicago Fire	-25

Next up is a look at the point differences, 2014 to 2015.

Team	Up/Down
Montreal Impact	23
San Jose Earthquakes	17
New York Red Bulls	10
Toronto FC	8
FC Dallas	6
Colorado Rapids	5
Portland Timbers	4
Vancouver Whitecaps FC	3
Houston Dynamo	3
Sporting Kansas City	2
Columbus Crew SC	1
New England Revolution	-5
Philadelphia Union	-5
Chicago Fire	-6
D.C. United	-8
LA Galaxy	-10
Seattle Sounders FC	-13
Real Salt Lake	-15

Going to have a little bit of fun here and whip up a little metric. We'll call it POWER POINTS. Consistency (repeatability) is extremely important in sports, so what I'm going to to is take the absolute value of the year to your point total difference and subtract it from the total of the two years.

Example: New York Red Bulls. 110 pts - 10 point, year to year difference = 100 POWER POINTS.

Power Pts	Team
108	FC Dallas
104	Columbus Crew SC
102	D.C. United
102	LA Galaxy
102	Seattle Sounders FC
100	New England Revolution
100	New York Red Bulls
100	Vancouver Whitecaps FC
98	Portland Timbers
98	Sporting Kansas City
82	Real Salt Lake
82	Toronto FC
78	Houston Dynamo
74	Philadelphia Union
64	Colorado Rapids
60	Chicago Fire
60	San Jose Earthquakes
56	Montreal Impact

Crew SC get a gold star here. Their point totals year to year were 52 in 2014 and 53 this year. That's about as consistent as you can be. In fact, best in the league. I love results like that. For me, it's the first place I look when trying to figure out if something is going well or not. One year improvements like Montreal, San Jose or the New York Red Bulls suggest instability just as much as teams that dropped points like a rock in Real Salt Lake, Seattle or the LA Galaxy.

COST PER POINT

Another clean way to look at success in the regular season is to take the aggregate (year end) salaries of both years and divide them by total points earned in the regular season.

$ p Pt	Team
$75,547	D.C. United
$76,057	FC Dallas
$79,456	Columbus Crew SC
$85,879	Real Salt Lake
$100,091	Sporting Kansas City
$100,185	Chivas USA
$105,319	Portland Timbers
$109,892	Vancouver Whitecaps FC
$116,918	Houston Dynamo
$118,635	San Jose Earthquakes
$122,525	Colorado Rapids
$126,126	Philadelphia Union
$131,657	New England Revolution
$138,175	Montreal Impact
$138,249	New York Red Bulls
$153,226	Chicago Fire
$198,897	Seattle Sounders FC
$291,386	LA Galaxy
$429,503	Orlando City SC
$438,746	Toronto FC
$495,258	New York City FC

You can see that there are basically three tiers of teams in MLS, in regards to spending on the competitive nature of the regular season (versus jersey sales, or ticket sales or what have you). DC, Dallas, Columbus and Salt Lake are clearly smart spenders. NYCFC, TFC and Orlando are wasteful.

The measure of success of any season is based upon goals each team sets forth (failing to set goals is a fail, of course), so it's impossible to know who achieved what on a team by team basis. What the above can do is give you a read on which teams are healthy and which are not.

MLS TV Ratings Flat in Playoffs

During a week where FOX announces a record-shattering 16 billion minutes consumed online, a regular season NFL game pulling 29.4 million viewers and even the Breeders Cup locking down 4.6 million (a 20 year record) - MLS playoffs on ESPN and FS1 see no improvement in viewership in their Sunday afternoon / evening slots.

There was a lot of soccer happening on Sunday, November 1st. Here is the breakdown of what people watched here in the United States.

1. USA - EPL: BOURNEMOUTH / SOUTHAMPTON (416k)
2. NBCSN - EPL: SUNDERLAND / EVERTON (395)
3. UDN - LMX: TOLUCA / AMERICA (386)
4. UDN - LMX: GUADALAJARA / PACHUCA (348)
5. ESPN - MLS: PORTLAND TIMBERS/VANCOUVER WHITECAPS (249)
6. FS1 - MLS: SEATTLE SOUNDERS / FC DALLAS (220)
7. ESPN - MLS: D.C. UNITED / NY RED BULLS (219)
8. FS1 - MLS: MONTREAL IMPACT / COLUMBUS CREW (136)

Despite being on channels with less distribution, a weak EPL clash on NBCSN match and two Liga MX games on UDN beat out MLS programming on ESPN and FS1.

ESPN boasts an industry-leading 92 million homes and likes to promote "flagship" programming across their family of networks like ESPN2 and ESPNU. UDN, on the other hand, has less than half the subscribers, but Liga MX beat out MLS by nearly +50%.

Perhaps even more damning for MLS on ESPN is that the league is regularly the least watched programming on the network each Sunday. Here is Nov. 1st, listed most watched to least...

Program, Start Time - Viewers
NFL COUNTDOWN, 11:00 AM - 1122k
SPORTSCENTER WEEKEND, 8:00 AM - 884
SPORTSCENTER WEEKEND, 9:00 AM - 862
SPORTSCENTER WEEKEND, 7:00 AM - 784
NFL INSIDERS: SUNDAY, 10:00 AM - 748
SPORTSCENTER, 12:37 AM - 638
NFL MATCHDAY, 6:30 AM - 530
COLLEGE FOOTBALL REPEAT, 6:00 AM - 480
SPORTSCENTER EARLY, 7:30 PM - 455
SPORTSCENTER LATE, 11:00 PM - 455
POKER, 10:00 PM - 383
CHAMPIONSHIP DRIVE, 1:00 PM - 374
POKER, 8:30 PM - 354
COLL FTBL SCOREBOARD, 1:30 PM - 280
MLS PLAYOFFS, 5:10 PM - 249
MLS PLAYOFFS, 3:00 PM - 219
CHAMPIONSHIP DRIVE, 2:30 PM - 200

One thing I'm learning about MLS on TV after tracking it all season is that there seems to be a faithful following of about 200-250k fans that will follow it to any network. FS1, ESPN, ESPN2 or UDN. I'm not sure you can call that a positive because the league doesn't attack the rest of the soccer watching public in the country.

By this point, it's widely known that NBCSN Premier League games regularly get above 500k each Saturday and Sunday. Bundesliga matches, the new product on the US TV soccer block, were out slow out of the gates this year, but their figures are already in MLS range on Fox Sports.

Many (many) words have been written on this site about ways to improve MLS and why the larger soccer loving public does not watch, so no need to go over the list. We are 20 years in on this MLS thing and the league has gained zero ground on the competition.

You don't need to be an industry insider to know that live sports programming is the most valuable property in television right now. MLS needs to make hay or it will risk falling hard when the inevitable "sports bubble" bursts (and it will).

[Facts, Figures via www.sportstvratings.com]

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Final note here is a lesson in narratives - Fox is starting to regularly report streaming viewership numbers. Turns out baseball isn't dead, or even dying (as you have been told since 1994). As a matter of fact, it is leading the way into the future of sports consumption. Imagine that. Here's a picture of the 800k fans showed up to World Series champions parade in KC.

About 800,000 people celebrated the @Royals’ #WorldSeries title Tuesday. Photo by Roy Inman, special to The Star pic.twitter.com/CqGw2nbf55

— The Kansas City Star (@KCStar) November 4, 2015

Crew Trying to Right the Playoff Ship

It only took ten or so games this year for anyone tuned into MLS to realize that Columbus was a playoff team. After the 2014 New England playoff disaster a year ago I'm not sure what I expected from the local team a year ago.

Here we are, though. Halfway through the 2015 two-legged eastern conference semifinals. Crew SC down a goal after an away matchup with a strong, Drogba infused Montreal Impact.

Columbus wasn't just facing a good opponent last Sunday. With most of the players from last year back, they were also trying to wash away the sharp sting of last year's failure.

Both teams played their game, for the most part. Crew controlled the ball well enough while the Impact defended well and were able to get off quick breaks and counters. No surprises. The difference maker was that Montreal did what they do well much better than Columbus. They also proved, once again, that bottling up Ethan Finlay first leads to an ineffective Kei Kamara.

Earlier this year I dug into Opta data and discovered that the Crew average more crosses into the box than any other team in the 14 tracked leagues by WhoScored. Most (if not all) of that, comes from the overlapping wing backs and Finlay. All of them crosses to essentially one person - Kamara.

Laurent Ciman (photo credit: ©BELGA)

This isn't to say that Columbus can't play a different style. They can. They absolutely can (see the 5-0 demolition of DC United in round 34). If they want to be a team that can win the MLS Cup they will have to learn to play with Kamara the way they do without (if that makes sense). Pumping the ball in on crosses might put you atop a number of simple offensive categories against normal MLS talent all year, but it will get you nowhere against experienced defenders like Marco Donadel, Víctor Cabrera and Laurent Ciman.

Even still, Columbus Crew SC were able this year to hang with a team like Montreal in the playoffs - at their place. Reminder that this is a team that worked their way to the CONCACAF Champions League Final. Crew SC are not out of the woods yet, of course. This story could take a turn for the worst yet still. There is a real fear there, considering the Impact's roster make-up of intelligent and experienced players.

It'll be interesting to see how Gregg Berhalter approaches this weekend's game. Based on what we've seen the past two years it's safe to say it'll be the same as all year. Is that enough to go +1 on Montreal this Sunday?

The story of the 2015 season has been waiting this moment for Crew SC. Berhalter has proven he can create a winner (and winners) during the regular season. MLS Cup is a wacky place, but it's still the time on the domestic league calendar where games are games.

This weekend is the place he can prove he can do it when it matters.